This invention relates to a simple, low cost method for cleaning cereal grains such as wheat, barley and the like.
Conventionally, cereal grains such as wheat are cleaned prior to further processing such as milling. In general, when the cereal grain being cleaned is wheat, the primary objectives are (1) to remove foreign material, particularly grains other than wheat such as corn, beans, oats and seeds; (2) to remove wheat with little or no endosperm, such as shrivelled or shrunken wheat grains and weather damaged kernels; (3) to remove infested or contaminated kernels in order to reduce insect fragment counts and microbiological counts of the processed grain; and (4) to remove dust adherent to wheat kernels in order to reduce microbiological counts.
In the past, disc machines, impact machines and scouring machines have been used in various combinations to perform these cleaning functions. Though these prior art approaches have been effective, a need presently exists for an improved grain cleaning process which exhibits reduced operating costs, maintenance costs, capital costs, and space requirements as compared with the prior art cleaning systems, without reducing the quality of the cleaned product.